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Officially, sexual violence has declined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, dubbed the ‘rape capital of the world’. But frontline workers tell a different story

Ruth Maclean in Goma

The mothers of Kavumu hardly sleep. But on rainy nights, they don’t even try. The rain pounds on their tin roofs so noisily that they worry they won’t hear rapists breaking in to steal their daughters. So they sit up all night, just watching their front doors.

Infant mortality rates in Afghanistan were once among the world’s worst, but a new children’s unit at Kandahar’s Mirwais hospital is accelerating slow progress

By Matthew Green in Kandahar

Among the tiniest of the premature babies slumbering in incubators at the Mirwais hospital, one bore a name chosen by hospital staff. At five days old, “Fatima” had been abandoned by her mother after being born so early that her family assumed she was destined for the grave.